A WORD FROM OUR FOUNDER

Welcome to the National Museum of Health + Medicine Chicago. The NMHM Chicago project was begun in late 2010 with the aim of initiating a national-scale program to work with and support the National Museum of Health & Medicine (NMHM), sited in Silver Spring, MD, in its research and educational missions, and to expand the nation's access to current and cutting-edge information which will foster better understanding of the past, present and future of health and medicine across the United States.

The NMHM Chicago is the first of what is hoped to become a series of privately-funded state of the art satellite locations across the nation. These satellite museums are intended to collectively form the central online repository for the NMHM's digital collections, archives and computational resources and, as such, will help the MD museum share its extensive collections digitally with a much broader audience. This mutually beneficial relationship will also provide the MD museum with regional anchors across the country and access to non-governmental sources of support outside of the capital.

Each satellite museum will feature interactive exhibits where visitors can explore biomedical information in new ways. It will also act as a home for a team of information scientists who will advance the museum’s research initiatives. In the area of education, each satellite will create an online community for students, parents, educators, and others to explore health science information while interacting with each other in social networks formed around topics in the health and medical sciences. For clinicians, each museum will provide an environment for social networking within knowledge-based affinity groups among health care workers globally. It will also give health care workers a powerful interactive online interface to the museum’s vast historical repositories and collections. Finally, the satellite museum network will also provide a rich online medical information resource for decision-makers in local, state, and federal governments.

The National Museum of Health & Medicine satellite museum program represents the synergistic convergence of efforts to advance the state-of-the-art in several areas: science education, museum design, information science, technology innovation, community outreach, and human health. Though sited in cities across the nation, these will truly be museums without walls, projecting their influence across the world, and providing a rich immersive information experience to users no matter where they are located.